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At Fort Bliss, the Officers’ Club was off-limits to the Germans. They had to build their own clubhouse in a storage shed, stocking it with homemade furniture and a bar they cobbled together from spare planks. Sometimes von Braun’s brother Magnus, who had been a supervisor at Mittelwerk, played the accordion. At other times, after a few rounds of tequila, when the monotony, seclusion, and language lessons got to them, they crept through a hole in the fence to look at the stars in the desert sky. “Prisoners of peace” was how they referred to themselves. But at least they were out of reach of the prosecutors and the war crimes tribunals in Europe that were meting out justice for the slaughter of slave laborers at Mittelwerk, among a host of other Nazi atrocities.

A year, and then two, passed aimlessly. Resources at Fort Bliss were as rare as rain. Only $47 million had been allocated in 1947 for total U.S. missile development, and that left precious little for the Germans. Fort Bliss’s miserly quartermaster turned down a request by von Braun’s brother for linoleum to cover the cracks between boards in the wood floor of the hut where delicate gyroscopes were assembled. He also denied a requisition for a high-speed drill. “Frankly, we were disappointed,” von Braun recalled years later. “At Peenemünde we had been coddled. Here you were counting pennies . . . and everyone wanted military expenditures curtailed.”

Von Braun bubbled with ideas for new rockets. But his every proposal was shot down. Nor was anyone particularly interested in his ideas for space travel either. He sent a manuscript on exploring Mars to eighteen publishers in New York, and eighteen rejection letters wended their way back to the Fort Bliss postmaster. Adding insult to injury, von Braun now had to report to a twenty-six-year-old major whose sole technical background was an undergraduate engineering degree. When von Braun was twenty-six, thousands of engineers had answered to him. His loyal Germans still insisted on calling him Herr Professor out of respect. But his pimply new American boss, Major Jim Hamill, addressed him as Wernher and didn’t even bother to respond to most of his plaintive memos requesting more materials. Just tinker with your old V-2s was the standing order from Colonel Toftoy in Washington. “We’ll put you on ice,” Stuhlinger recalled Hamill saying. “We may need you later on.”

The U.S. government had gone through a great deal of trouble to ensure that no other power acquired the services of Nazi Germany’s rocket elite. Retaining “control of German individuals who might contribute to the revival of German war potential in foreign countries,” as a State Department memo inelegantly put it, had been the primary justification for the 1947 decision to make von Braun’s temporary stay in America more permanent. Even if the United States didn’t need him right now, Washington wanted to make certain no one else got his expertise. Due to their “threat to world security,” the Germans couldn’t be repatriated. To a frustrated von Braun, it seemed that the United States had dumped him and his team in deepest Texas and forgotten all about them. “We were distrusted aliens living in what for us was a desolate region of a foreign land,” he recalled. “Nobody seemed much interested in work that smelled of weapons.”

• • •

Von Braun might have languished indefinitely under the hot Texas sun if not for the actions of two men: Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and North Korea’s Communist leader, Kim II Sung.

McCarthy’s Red-baiting reign of terror—when everyone from J. Robert Oppenheimer to what seemed like half of Hollywood was accused of Communist sympathies—inadvertently helped to rehabilitate von Braun. The only skeletons in his closet were Nazi skeletons, and the Reich was yesterday’s enemy. Berlin was no longer the seat of evil. The divided city had been transformed into a symbol of freedom by the massive airlift orchestrated by Symington and LeMay in 1948, when three hundred thousand